Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

But it’s hard for me to remember him that way: my last picture of him is the one that sticks. I got it the night of Jeffol’s second call.

He came in late, popping through the door with a brand-new service Colt in one hand and a kris in the other. At his heels trotted old Ca’bi, his mother, followed by broken-nosed Jokanain and a mean little runt named Unga. The old woman carried a bundle of something tied up in nipa leaves, Jokanain swung a heavy barong, and Unga held an ancient blunderbuss.

I started up from where I was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Unga centered the blunderbuss on me.

“Diam dudok!”

I sat still. Blunderbusses are wicked, and Unga had lost twelve dollars Mex to me three nights before.

Levison had jerked to his feet, and then he stopped. The Colt in Jeffol’s hand was too large and too steady for even a monster like Levison to jump at. Dinihari was the only one of us who moved. She flung herself between Jeffol and Levison, hut the Moro swept her out of the way with his left arm, swept her over into a corner without taking eyes or gun from the hairs man.

Old Ca’bi hobbled across the floor and peeped into each of the other rooms.

“Mari,” she croaked from the sleeping-room door.

Step by step Jeffol drove Levison across the room and through that door, Ca’bi going in with them. The door closed and Unga, holding me with the gun, put his back against it.

Dinihari sprang up and dashed toward him. Jokanain caught her from behind and flung her into her corner again. Beyond the door Levison roared out oaths. Ca’bi’s voice cackled excitedly in answering oaths, and in orders to her son. Bind (ikat) and naked (telanjang) were the only words I could pick out of the din. Then Levison’s voice choked off into silence, and no sound at all came from the sleeping-room.

In our room there was no motion. Dinihari sat still in her corner, staring at her feet. Unga and Jokanain were two ugly statues against two doors. The chatter of flying foxes busy among the cottonwoods and the rustling of thatch in a breeze heavy with the stink of drying tripang were the only things you could hear.

I had a dull, end-of-the-road feeling. A Moro is a simple son of nature. When he finds himself so placed that he can kill, he usually kills. Otherwise, it runs in his head, of what use is the power? It’s a sort of instinct for economy. I suspected that Levison, gagged, was being cut, in the Moro fashion, into very small bits; and, while my death might be less elaborate, I didn’t doubt that it too was in the cards. You don’t last long among the Moros once you let them get the bulge on you. If not tonight, some young buck will cut you down tomorrow night, just because he knows he can do it.

Half an hour or more went by slower than you would think it could. My nerves began bothering me: fear taking the form of anger at the suspended activity of the trap I was in; impatience to see the end and get it over with.

I had a gun under my shirt. If I could snake it out and pot Unga, then I had a chance of shooting it out with Jeffol and Jokanain. If I wasn’t fast enough, Unga would turn loose the blunderbuss and blow me and the wall behind me into the Celebes Sea, all mixed up so you couldn’t say which was which. But even that was better than passing out without trying to take anybody with me.

However, there was still gin in the bottle beside me, and it would make the going easier if I could get it in me. I experimented with a slowly reaching hand. Unga said nothing, so I picked up the bottle and took a long drink, leaving one more in it — a stirrup cup, you might say. As I took the bottle down from my mouth, feet pattered in the next room, and old Ca’bi came squeezing out of the door, her mouth spread from ear to ear in a she-devil’s grin.

“Panggil orang-orang,” she ordered Jokanain, and he went out.

I put the last of the gin down my throat. If I were going to move, it would have to be before the rest of the village got here. I set the empty bottle down and scratched my chin, which brought my right hand within striking distance of my gun.

Then Levison bellowed out like a bull gone mad — a bellow that rattled the floor-timbers in their rattan lashings. Jeffol, without his Colt, came tumbling backward through the door, upsetting Unga. The blunderbuss exploded, blowing the roof wide open. In the confusion I got my gun out — and almost dropped it.

Levison stood in the doorway — but my God!

He was as big as ever — they hadn’t whittled any of him away — but he was naked, and without a hair on him anywhere. His skin, where it wasn’t blue with ropemarks, was baby-pink and chafed. They had shaved him clean.

My gaze went up to his head, and I got another shock. Every hair had been scraped off or plucked out, even to his eyebrows, and his naked head sat upon his immense body like a pimple. There wasn’t a quart of it. There was just enough to hold his big beaked nose and his ears, which stood out like palm leaves now that they weren’t supported by hair. Below his loose mouth, his chin was nothing but a sloping down into his burly throat, and the damned thing trembled like a hurt baby’s. His eyes, not shadowed now by shaggy brows, were weak and poppy. A gorilla with a mouse’s head wouldn’t have looked any funnier than Levison without his hair; and the anger that purpled him made him look sillier still. No wonder he had hidden himself behind whiskers!

Dinihari was the first to laugh — a rippling peal of pure amusement. Then I laughed, and Unga and Jeffol. But it wasn’t our laughter that beat Levison. We could only have goaded him into killing us. Old Ca’bi turned the trick. The laughter of an old woman is a thing to say prayers against, and Ca’bi was very old.

She pointed a finger at Levison and screeched over it with a glee that was hellish. Her shriveled gums writhed in her open mouth, as if convulsed with mirth of their own, her scrawny throat swelled and she hopped up and down on her bony feet. Levison forgot the rest of us, turned toward her, and stopped. Her thin body shuddered in frenzies of derision, and her voice laughed as sane people don’t. You could almost sec it — metal lashes of laughter that coiled round his naked body, cut him into raw strips, paralyzed his muscles.

His big body became limp, and he pawed his face with a hand that jerked away as if the touch of the beardless face had burnt it. His knees wobbled, moisture came into his eyes, and his tiny chin quivered. Ca’bi swayed from side to side and hooted at him — a hag gone mad with derision. He backed away from her, cringing back from her laughter like a dog from a whip. She followed him up — laughed him through the sleeping-room door, laughed him back to the far side of the sleeping-room, laughed him through the thin wall. A noise of rippling as he went through the thatch, and a splash of water.

Dinihari stopped laughing and wiped her wet face with her sleeve. Her eyes were soft under Jeffol’s cold gaze.

“Your slave (patek) rejoices,” she cooed, “that her master has recovered his anting-anting and is strong again.”

“Not so,” Jeffol said, and he unbent a little, because she was a woman to want, and because a Moro loves a violent joke. “But there is much in the book of the Christian (neserani kitab). There is a talc the missionary (tuan padri) told me of a hairy one named Sansão, who was strong against his enemies until shorn of his hair. Many other magics (tangkal) are in the book for all occasions.”

So that damned Langworthy was at the bottom of it!

I never saw him again. That night I left the island in Levison’s yawl with the pick of his goods. He was gone, I knew, even if not in one of the sharks that played round the point. His house would be looted before morning, and I had more right to his stuff than the Moros. Hadn’t I been his friend?